56% of US Investors Rely on Their Own Research. Is Your Disclosure Ready for Them?

Investors increasingly research major financial decisions on their own, moving between search, social media and AI for answers. The result is "more sources, but less clarity than ever" according to Betterment’s 2026 Retail Investor Survey of 1,000 US investors [1]. Some 56% rely primarily on their own research and judgment when making a major financial decision. For a small-cap company, that means the person reading your announcement may be making sense of it alone, without an advisor to help interpret what it means.

#Retail Investors Have Already Changed

Betterment's survey shows where investors turn when a decision matters. In the survey, 56% named their own research and judgment as the top source for a major financial decision, well ahead of financial advisors and friends and family, which tied at 16%. Choosing what to buy is a major financial decision, and investors who rely on their own research are likely to bring that same approach to their stock portfolio.

A large company has sell-side analysts standing between its filings and that investor. A small-cap company usually has few or none. The retail investor becomes their own analyst, working from a phone, a search bar and whatever the company published, with nobody translating the story along the way.

Betterment concludes that social media and AI extend that same instinct, because investors use them to gather more information and then decide for themselves. Investors have already changed how they research, yet public company communication is still built for an audience that relies on a professional to interpret it.

#More Sources, Less Clarity

Optimism improved this year. 55% of investors reported a positive financial outlook for 2026, up from 48% a year earlier, while retirement confidence slid from 56% to 44%. Investors feel better about the year ahead, but less certain about their ability to prepare for the years that follow.

Access to information has never been broader, and the survey suggests access is not what investors lack. Understanding is. Your disclosures were written to satisfy regulators and to inform lawyers and institutional analysts, who have the training and the time to decode dense language. Retail investors face complexity that, in the words of Betterment's Director of Financial Planning, "arrives faster than their time or knowledge can keep up with."

Publishing more does not close that gap, because a longer release hands the investor more material to decode alone. We made the same argument in Retail Investors Need A Translator, Not More Disclosures.

Retail investors accounted for roughly 30% of daily US equity volume as of July 2026, according to Goldman Sachs data reported by Bloomberg [2]. That is a market-wide figure, so the share for an individual company can sit well above or below it. Bloomberg's reporting suggests this flow now looks structural rather than episodic, with self-directed brokerage accounts holding an estimated $12 trillion in equities, about 10% of the US corporate equity market, according to Goldman.

One note on the Betterment data. Betterment is a US digital investing platform, and it surveyed 1,000 respondents online between March 27 and April 3, 2026, split evenly across Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers, so the overall figures lean younger than the US investing population.

#Where Investors Look, and What They Find There

Social media is now the most commonly cited financial news source for Gen Z, at 60% in 2026, up from 45% in 2024. Across all investors surveyed the share is 35%, and 44% say they feel at least somewhat pressured by social media to act on financial trends.

AI adds a second channel, and it is already shaping decisions. Among investors who trust AI for financial advice, 53% say it has influenced a financial decision they otherwise would not have made, against 5% of those who distrust it. Among Gen Z, 48% say AI has already influenced a decision.

The same logic applies to how investors research the companies they own. An investor who asks a search engine, searches on YouTube, or prompts a chatbot about your company receives an answer assembled from whatever is easiest to find and read. If your story is not optimized for those channels and doesn’t provide a simple and clear message, the investor acts on someone else's version of it.

#Disclosure Doesn't End at Publication

Most investor relations tooling rests on one assumption, which is that the job is done when the release goes out. The survey points toward what that assumption leaves out.

Betterment found that investors who combine professional advice with their own research feel "more confident and in control than any other group." Betterment's Mindy Yu draws the same conclusion, that confidence "doesn't come from finding a 'silver bullet' source of truth; it comes from building a support stack."

Communication is one driver of investor confidence among several, but it is one a company can influence directly.

A disclosure dropped on the wire and left there gives an investor no support at all. Publication isn't the end of the work. It should be viewed as the beginning of your relationship with the investor.

#Clear, Discoverable, and On-Script

Much of this sits outside your control. Retail research habits have changed, and analyst coverage of small and mid-caps is thin. What you control is how clearly your disclosures reach the investor who is doing the work alone. 

FAQSIR, the Story Insights platform, was built around three ideas.

Clarity comes first. Every disclosure becomes plain-English summaries, video and FAQs, along with an AI analyst that investors can question directly. When investors understand the story, they can form a view of it, and each question they ask shows you where the disclosure fell short.

Discoverability follows. The content is built to be found in the channels investors use, from search and YouTube to ChatGPT and Gemini. The survey documents the rise in popularity of social media and AI for stock research. Search and video come from independent research of where retail investors research.

Integrity keeps the whole thing on script. FAQSIR uses closed-context AI, which generates every output strictly from what you have already published. Given that 53% of investors who trust AI say it has influenced a decision they otherwise would not have made, the source of its answers matters. Betterment's president argues that AI should make expert guidance more accessible, not replace it. Closed-context AI applies the same principle, restating your disclosure rather than replacing it.

Corporate disclosures are written for specialists, but retail investors increasingly make decisions with limited time and context. If a company announcement is hard to understand, they may move on. FAQSIR helps companies explain their news clearly, giving retail investors a better chance to engage with the story and become informed shareholders.

Companies that recognize the shift early will build retail shareholder bases their competitors struggle to match. The investor is already researching alone. What remains open is whether the story they find is clear, discoverable and consistent with what you published.

See how FAQSIR works at https://www.digitonic.com/faqsir-the-story-insights-platform